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[FRIDAY THREAD] How are you, really?
How are you doing this week? Tell me all about it and catch up on my favorite posts of the week.
There are a lot of new people this week, so this is probably your first Friday Thread. First, welcome! Second, this is probably my favorite single thing I do every week because it gives me a chance to shout out some amazing articles and get to know you better. There are two ways to interact with this post.
1 - If you don’t want to say anything, or bristle at identifying yourself, then you can reply with this nifty poll.
2 - If you’re feeling very brave, then reply below and tell us how you are doing right now on a scale from 1-5.
Last week more than half the people said they were a three or above, which is a whole lot better than the previous week, so woot!!!
Right now, I’m a 2.5. I’m slowly gaining from 1.5 two weeks ago. I have Free Comic Book Day at Pulp Fiction in Long Beach on Saturday, giving away 100 free copies of Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter volume 1. If you’re in Long Beach, make sure to stop by for your free copy. If not, you can get your free copy right here. All you have to do is pay $9.60 for shipping and handling. I haven’t offered free books like this in a few years and this is probably the last time for a while I’ll do it. It’s only available until Sunday.
Easily my most popular post launched this week, all about how to survive as an artist in the hypercapitalist hellscape we find ourselves.
This post about going paid on Substack without selling your soul and this one about neutral thinking are about to go behind the paywall if you haven’t read them yet. Of course, you can access all my previous posts by becoming a paid subscriber.
Next Wednesday I’ll be launching a post about whether it’s possible to be happy and a writer at the same time.
Here is a preview:
The concept that the best art comes from tragedy is ridiculous, after all. Lord of the Rings was written by a father telling a story to his son, and it was revolutionary. Whether it is even ethical to profit from tragedy is a conversation I will keep to another day, but there’s no doubt that the general scholarship on the topic states that we write better when we are sad. In fact, when I typed “can you be happy to write”, this was the first article that popped up, titled Why You Can’t Write When You’re Happy.
Here are some of my favorite Substacks from the week that you might like to read this weekend. I think they will help synthesize my post this week, which I didn’t plan but was excited to see.
Absentee Capitalism by ties in the WGA strike and the cuts across the media landscape with hypercapitalism. Meanwhile, For 20 Years, I Regretted Leaving Hollywood. Lately, I Think I Made the Right Call by talks about extricating himself from the capitalist hellscape of Los Angeles and finding peace with a different life
What Happens When Information Overwhelms Knowledge? by and How to Listen Well to Build Trust by make really good points about listening better
Let's talk about growing your subscription business by and Why Do We Keep Publishing Like It's a Launch Business When It's Always Been a Subscription Business? by both talk about how to think about and build a subscription business (which is really hard).
An Autistic editor wants to help you think like a journo and keep "reader leaps" in mind by blew my mind for the second time in as many weeks talking about reader leaps
What to ask yourself when you feel impossibly stuck by , & Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires and Loss Aversion and The True Cost of Satisfaction Might Be Giving Up What You Didn't Want by might not seem to go together at first blush, but they are all about the things that prevent you from chasing what you want, and what that even means. I originally only included one of Tara's articles this week, but if you read one you really have to read both because they build on each other.
I hope you have a nice weekend where you can recover all the spoons and do something that lights you up inside. Tomorrow, I have my last show for a while on Free Comic Book Day. Are you hitting up free comic book day at your local shop tomorrow?